This week, Governor Newsom joined San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo for a housing round table discussion and heard stories from residents who are struggling to afford housing and face taxing commutes, as reported by the Mercury News. Immediately following the event, Governor Newsom signed two executive orders to help spur production, including creating an inventory of all state-owned property that could be turned into housing and moving the building process forward by soliciting development proposals and long-term lease agreements. Click here to view CHC’s statement in response.

GimmeShelter, a CALmatters podcast focused on covering California’s housing policies, takes a closer look at the many housing and homelessness proposals in the State Budget. Lastly, the Los Angeles Times Editorial Board applauds the Governor’s challenge to NIMBYism and his plan to tie transportation funding to housing goals.

HOUSING CRISIS

Newsom, San Jose mayor join forces in fight for housing
Mercury News
Flanked by Gov. Gavin Newsom and surrounded by Bay Area residents struggling with the region’s cost of living, San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo on Tuesday pledged $10 million to help fund the governor’s ambitious housing development goals and hinted more money will follow from Silicon Valley tech companies. In their joint San Jose appearance, the new governor and the mayor of Silicon Valley’s largest city sent a message loud and clear — the state’s housing shortage is a top priority.

California housing crisis podcast: Newsom’s big affordable-housing budget
GimmeShelter
Gov. Gavin Newsom attempted to make a dent in California’s housing-affordability problems in his first budget proposal last week. Newsom put forward $2.3 billion in new low- and moderate-income housing and homelessness spending. And he also promised to — for the first time — to punish cities and counties that don’t approve enough new homes by taking away their transportation dollars.

Could Gov. Newsom’s ambitious housing goals be sidelined by a worker shortage?
Mercury News
Gov. Gavin Newsom has said he wants to build as many as 3.5 million new houses by 2025 to solve California’s housing crisis. But those ambitious goals could be derailed without hundreds of thousands of new construction workers needed to dramatically accelerate the pace of California home building, even assuming that cities agree to zone for more housing and there’s money available to build it all. And it’s hard to imagine, given recent trends, where that many additional workers in the low-wage, high-risk industry would come from.

Gov. Gavin Newsom wants the tech industry to help pay for new housing. But not for the neediest Californians
Los Angeles Times
California’s housing affordability crisis over the past decade has coincided with a boom in tech-fueled job growth. Now Gov. Gavin Newsom is calling on Silicon Valley companies to make an unprecedented contribution to help build new homes — but his idea is drawing concern from some budget watchers and government ethics advocates who worry about the political influence the tech industry could gain. Newsom said his administration is asking corporations to provide developers with low-interest loans to build housing for teachers, nurses and other middle-class Californians.

California’s housing affordability crisis looms over the state’s problems with teachers
CNBC
California’s housing affordability crisis has made it more difficult for school districts to attract and retain teachers, a large reflection of a problem affecting education systems across the country. The challenge of luring and keeping teachers is notoriously a problem for the San Francisco Bay Area, where housing prices are among the highest in the nation. But it’s become a difficult issue in other areas of the state, as well, and it has led to some districts fighting back with affordable-housing measures and other relief efforts.

Editorial: Tech titans need to respond to Newsom housing challenge
Mercury News
Gov. Gavin Newsom is challenging the Bay Area’s most successful corporate leaders to partner with the state government in solving California’s housing crisis. Good for him. The governor is stating the obvious: The only way the Bay Area can address a problem of this magnitude is if all the crucial players — business, labor, government — work together and contribute their fair share. The critical, unanswered question is what businesses’ contribution should be. The growing consensus — articulated by the governor at his Thursday budget press conference — is that the region’s tech titans should be doing more.

STATE HOUSING POLICIES

Can state government make a dent in California’s housing crisis?
Mercury News
One of the central issues looming before California’s new governor, Gavin Newsom, is the state’s acute housing affordability crisis. As he unveiled his first budget blueprint this month, days into the job, Newsom spoke at length about the depth of the problem and how he aimed to attack it, from new state investments in affordable housing to better local planning. In his speech, Newsom hit a notably different tone than that of his predecessor, former Gov. Jerry Brown, who in an exit interview with NPR last month questioned the limits of the state’s ability to make housing more affordable.

Could Anti-Price Gouging Laws Slow Rising Rents?
KPBS
Crooning in the shower is not Chad Regeczi’s thing. That’s why when he learned last year his monthly rent would go up $300 so the new owners of his La Mesa apartment could upgrade his bathroom with a sound system, he was bemused. “300 bucks!” he said. “I mean an iPod costs less than that. Everybody has got a phone now. Who needs a Bluetooth speaker in a bathroom apartment? It’s just weird.” Regeczi, a VA employee, said the 30 percent rent increase didn’t match the condition of his apartment. But he felt powerless to challenge his landlords on the hike.

Should California revive redevelopment?
CALmatters
An anything-is-possible attitude enveloped post-World War II America, fueling ambitious undertakings such as a nationwide network of freeways, nuclear power so inexpensive that it wouldn’t need to be metered, and exploring outer space. It also spawned what was called “redevelopment,” a tool that would, it was said, clean up inner city slums and help their residents enjoy the nation’s ever-expanding prosperity. California’s version of redevelopment hinged on the novel notion of “tax increment financing.” Local governments, cities mostly, could deem neighborhoods as “blighted,” borrow money through bonds to improve housing and other services, and repay the loans from the property tax “increments” that those improvements generated.

Editorial: California is about to embark on Newsom’s housing vision. It must be done smartly
McClatchy California
Gov. Gavin Newsom wants 2019 to go down in history as the year the middle class started to return to California. How might that happen? By addressing the housing crisis. Newsom has come out of the gate with the audacious goal of constructing 3.5 million new housing units in the state by 2025. To do that, more than 378,000 homes would need to be built every year statewide — quadruple the current rate of construction. The last time that many homes were built in California in one year was 1954, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Editorial: Gavin Newsom goes big on housing. Will California NIMBYs play along?
Los Angeles Times
When Gov. Gavin Newsom said he wasn’t going to play “small ball” on the state’s housing crisis, he wasn’t kidding. On his fourth day on the job, Newsom offered a budget that includes an additional $2.3 billion to build more housing for low-income and homeless Californians and to help cities rezone and streamline approvals to speed up housing development. He paired that with a proposal to radically overhaul the state’s housing strategy, including a controversial proposal to withhold transportation dollars from communities that fail to build enough homes to meet their needs.

Editorial: Gov. Gavin Newsom’s first budget emphasizes housing, with tough-love approach
San Diego Union Tribune
On his fourth day in office, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s freewheeling news conference outlining his first state budget was a fascinating mix of smart ideas and risky ones with potential that may not pan out. It’s a tricky balancing act, courtesy of a huge projected $21.5 billion budget surplus. His $209 billion total budget — a 4 percent increase on the existing state budget — included $1.8 billion to improve early childhood education, more than doubled the size of the tax break given to low-income workers and boosted welfare payments to the impoverished.

CALIFORNIA BUDGET & REVENUE

About that giant, surplus-plus budget surplus
CALmatters
What would you do with a $21.4 billion windfall? That’s essentially the question California is confronting amid record surplus projections in Gov. Gavin Newsom’s first year in office. On one hand, the former San Francisco mayor showcased his progressive agenda by setting ambitious goals for universal preschool, expanding health coverage for undocumented immigrants, and proposing the nation’s most generous paid family leave program.

HOMELESSNESS

California is moving homeless people into sheds – but is it right?
The Guardian
Eric Clark didn’t know if he’d survive the sheds. As the city of Oakland began clearing homeless communities off the streets last year and placing them into sheds under a freeway, the 51-year-old reluctantly moved in and quickly had problems. One day, another occupant pulled a gun on him during an argument. He thought it couldn’t get much worse than fearing for his life in a new home that reminded him of jail. But then the program kicked him out – without justification, he said – and he no longer had a street encampment to join or even a blanket to sleep outside.

Nearly $18 million in state funds to address homelessness awarded to Los Angeles, Orange and Inland Empire counties
Orange County Register
In one of the year’s first big disbursements of funding to help people who are homeless or at-risk of being homeless, the state has awarded nearly $18 million to a half-dozen Southern California planning networks that coordinate money and services to address homelessness. The money is part of a total of $53.3 million from the California Emergency Solutions and Housing Program that is being divided among all of the state’s 43 Continuums of Care representing each county and a number of cities, according to a state Dept. of Housing and Community Development announcement issued Friday, Jan. 11.

PROP 2

Opinion: I live with mental illness and I’m not a bad person
Mercury News
Most citizens perceive persons with mental illness almost as subhuman. There are numerous stereotypes and common misperceptions to which most non-afflicted people ascribe. In some families, the very existence of a mentally ill family member is hidden; in other instances, a relative will apologize for them. Today, mental illnesses are considered shameful. We are associated with depravity, with uncleanliness, with being “druggies” or we are thought to be dangerous. Society is harsh toward people with a mental illness.

RENT CONTROL

Gov. Gavin Newsom Says California Is Continuing The Discussion On Rent Control
Capital Public Radio
California Gov. Gavin Newsom says conversations are underway on rent stabilization, after voters rejected a rent control ballot measure last fall. Newsom spoke Tuesday in San Jose at a roundtable discussion on California’s housing crisis, saying the state is speaking with housing industry groups about possible next steps following the defeat of Proposition 10 in November. “We’re working with some of the biggest developers in the state and the biggest advocates — both the Apartment Association, the realtors and others — to pursue what we perceive — or rather, we refer to — as a compromise around Proposition 10,” Newsom said.